Edo Berger also presented the Leo Goldman prize for excellence in a senior thesis to Eden Girma. Eden is also a recipient of a University Hoopes Prize for the project entitled “Astrometric Detection of Intermediate Mass Black Holes.”

At the annual Awards Ceremony, Rita Fireman and Astronomy Chair Avi Loeb are seen presenting the Fireman Fellowship Award to Philip Cowperthwaite for this year's best dissertation in the field of Astrophysics at Harvard. This award is named in honor of Rita's husband, Edward Fireman, a long time physicist at the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory. Phil is a student of Edo Berger and will be starting a Hubble Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena.

"What is the distribution of sizes of black holes in our universe? Can black holes of any mass exist, or are there gaps in their possible sizes? The shape of this black-hole mass function has been debated for decades — and the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy has only spurred further questions."

Garcia-Mejia: Last month, I was lucky enough to win a NASA lottery to attend the TESS launch as a VIP guest at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. As is the case with rocket launches, there were a series of launch windows starting on April 16, 2018, at 6:32pm. As hundreds of scientists were getting ready to board the buses that would take us from the KSC visitor complex to the viewing site on April 16, a NASA representative crushed our launch-viewing dreams with a simple two words: "launch scrubbed". A second launch window did not open until Wednesday, April 18 at 6:...

Astronomy Courses

Spotlight: Fernando Becerra

Fernando Becerra is a 6th year grad student working with Prof Lars Hernquist on the formation of the first supermassive black holes in the Universe. To study this process, he runs numerical simulations that mimic the formation of such objects in the early Universe. Before his PhD, Fernando got his Bachelor and Master degree at Universidad de Chile. As one of his side projects, he created astrollytelling.io to combine interactive web visualizations and astronomy outreach. In his free time, Fernando likes rock climbing, hiking, camping, and photography.